Please Undo The Misguided Merging Of Subscribing And Rating Up

EP has created problems for members by merging the Subscribe / Unsubscribe feature with the Rate Up feature.

I do not want to subscribe to all the stories I rate up. In fact I would say many of the stories I rate up I do not wish to subscribe to. (After all, there are a great many things in life requiring attention other than the Experience Project.) As an example, I have often given an author in this group a Rate Up when he wrote a story that raised a problem I felt was worth raising but did not concern me enough personally for me to be interested in following.

On the other hand, we members will often wish to subscribe to stories we do not agree with or do not feel merited a Rate Up. As datura said at EP Link "I don't always want to rate up a story that I want to follow though, Arsineh. Sometimes I follow it because a person in my circle is involved in a discussion and I want to see the outcome. I don't always feel the story is worthy of being rated up. How can I subscribe to those stories now?" At present we are deprived of the option we used to have to subscribe to stories we did not want to rate up.

It is true that commenting will also now subscribe us to a story, but again we may want to follow stories we did not see fit to comment on. Sometimes, for example, a fight may interest me but I may wish to stay clear of involvement.

Another problem with removing the Subscribe / Unsubscribe button has been that our options for unsubscribing from stories are reduced. It appears to me now that one can only unsubscribe from a story when one receives an e-mail notification of it (if that still works--I haven't tried it lately).

It also occurs to me that because we do not want to get bombarded with notifications that absorb too much of our limited time, it is likely that attaching an automatic story subscription to rating up will be a powerful disincentive for members being generous with rating up.

EP Support has explained subtracting from us the option to subscribe without rating up by saying "we wanted to simplify things." But there has in the past year been a lot of simplifying that has agitated the membership. There is a repeated pattern of very useful features being subtracted from us, as demonstrated here and in the story at EP Link . Polls have been hidden and for all intents have ceased to be part of the life of EP. Please stop taking away useful features.

Thanks for sharing. What you're saying makes a lot of sense. I can understand why you wouldn't necessarily want to receive updates on all the content you subscribe to/rate up.

We're simplifying the story page by getting rid of options that were rarely used and caused confusion for many members (the subscribe/unsubscribe buttons) I know that for those who use the feature it was helpful because it gave you the option to pick and choose what you follow independent of whether you comments or rate up a post.

Now that said, removing these buttons and listing content you've rated up under your 'favorite' on your profile page was step one.

We'll soon be adding a number of management tools for members so you can better organize and sort your favorites (rates ups, thanks to authors, old favorites, etc) We'll also be giving you more options so you can select they types of updates you want to receive. More options means a more personalized EP for you so you can use it the way you want and get updates on the content that matters most to you!

Now--because we're a small team and had to roll this out in parts, I know it can be frustrating in the sort term until we have these management tools rolled out but we're working diligently to get these options out to you as soon as possible.

As for your list of old favorites, they haven't been lost and do appear under your list of favorites. If you're having trouble finding them among the stories you've rated up and need to access them before we rollout these management tools for you, you can always PM me and I'll send you a link of your old favorites.

So now we will have to take additional time to deal with stories we rated up that got put into our favorites that we don't even want there. Just like we have to flip between profile page, home page, activity page instead of one simple page like we used to have. It just keeps getting to be more and more of a time-consuming redundant mess.

This as all so CRAZY!!!. No longer can we just dip in to write stories and comments. Now its like a major admin job to wade through .. no longer a respite from daily life , just more unwelcome chores!!!

I agree with your story, and I notice that the favorite/library feature also has been merged into that; I think for every story we rate up, automatically we subscribe to it and it gets added to our favorites/library. The system should not be this way; those features should have been kept separate.

Datura hit the nail on the head when she said that EP really has no honsest concept of how we use the site. And so they don't understand how frustrating it is to try to do all the different functions that were mentioned in the post and comments.It doesn't work to lump all things together, for the sake of simplyfying.And then they do the opposite and duplicate the way they notify us that we have a fan, or a friend, or a message, or a gesture. For ex: Why have the gesture at all, if your going to put it on the whiteboard, plus on the banner at the top left..I end up reading the same blurb 3 times in order to get rid of the notice. That isn't simplifying, it is triplicating, and it is annoying.

I have said before and will repeat now that I feel EP has no idea of the way we use this site. They have recently removed our ability to subscribe to stories of our choosing, to unsubscribe, to chose stories for our own personal library of favorites, and to rate up stories without it being broadcast on the activity feed and without the stories being added to our library whether we wish them to be or not.

These changes alter my ability to use this site in the way I desire, in the way I have used it for five years.

I cannot begin to tell you how upsetting this is, EP. You truly have become your own worst enemy.

I agree, merging the functions into one button was a poor choice. There are several stories on here that I believe merit a rating increase, but I don't care to follow it after I read it.

Making changes like this is pretty much the same thing as a new commander on a military installation making policy changes just so he/she could say they made a helpful contribution to how the unit operates. They don't really consult anyone the policy affects, they just do it.

I'm not saying no one cares about how the changes affect the users here, but if something isn't broken, don't try to fix it.

Another member in a p.m. to me gave a list of subtracted features : "I could list many more but the ones I miss the most include displaying author names & displaying dates in lists of stories & etc., grid view, people in my circle's circle, petitions, profile headline, showing flags for "new" or "read", showing number of comments submitted & number of comments liked by others, story reactions, reputation, quizes, and others that don't come to mind at the moment."

I'm left wondering how many more of the features I enjoy and use will disappear? But it doesn't have to be this way. EP can give us back the features we miss.

I really feel staff are missing the point of the site these days. User's should be consulted (in depth) about the changes implimented. At the moment they are changing things with the mindset 'oh this would be cool' and 'of course they will like this', instead of listening to what user's are actually asking for. No one wants these sort of changes, we want a safe and working site.

Reece I can assure you that we don't make changes for the sake of change alone. We've over the last year changed the way we rollout and developer feature so that we can get in as much user feedback as possible.

We've added the option for members to beta test features, still in progress, and offer feedback, months before the feature is ever released.

Each member can opt into beta tests from their account settings but unfortunately very few do.

Engineers will regularly post to this group requesting feedback on a feature but again, members choose to not comment. You'll notice that EPJoey posted a story to this group just a few days ago but yet received zero responses.

We value member feedback however we're sometimes forced to make decisions, incorporating the feedback of just a few members because other members choose to share their feedback.

I encourage you and more members to try our beta tests so you can offer your ideas in the early stages of the development process.

More From People Who Want to Improve the Experience Projects

Newly Released: Story Editing + Better Spam Filtering + More! It's been a couple weeks since our last update and since then we've been plugging away, working on building a number of requested features to help make EP easier and more enjoyable to use by strengthening our spam...

You don’t have to look very far these days to find a story about how disgusted people are with all of the changes on Ep. I think there is one every day in my activity feed. I feel kind of sorry for the people who are so unhappy. I feel so bad that I recently became a supporter...

Yes, I do want to improve the Experience Project.
I want my son, the computer engineer, not to be lecturing me about EP and what a bad reputation it has acquired. "Look it up, mom. You'll see". I did. He was right. "Google any disgusting topic and see what comes up, mom." I did...

I am very unhappy about the changes EP has made to the Library feature. I was very fond of this feature. Previously there was a "Favorite" button to click at the bottom of a story that put stories in our Library. It was very useful to me to keep a very limited number of stories...